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By Mary Shelley

Source: Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them . Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Vol. 1: Ancient Times to the American and French Revolutions (Prehistory-1790s). Detroit: Gale, 1997. From Literature Resource Center.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the daughter of two of England's most nonconformist thinkers, William Godwin, the radical philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At age seventeen, Mary fell in love with renowned English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and fled with him to Europe. Under the influence of her husband and Lord Byron, Mary's literary talents began to flourish. After Byron issued a challenge for each of the three writers to create a ghost story, Mary began her most famous novel, Frankenstein. It is a product of the Romantic era and deals with several of the Romantic movement's most crucial ideas, including isolation, alienation, and the destruction that can result from man's selfish desires.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Industrial Revolution in England

In the mid-1700s, Great Britain experienced a surge in population that helped initiate the Industrial Revolution. The population of England in 1700 was 6 million; by 1800 it had climbed to more than 9 million people. Advances in agriculture—which played the most significant role in the increase in population—provided a greater supply of food and better overall health for the nation's inhabitants.

Population also soared because of developments in medicine and hygiene. Beginning in 1760, inoculations for smallpox became available; the number of deaths from the terrible disease greatly decreased as a result. Another sickness that had decimated the population for centuries was typhus. Originating among rats, the disease was transmitted by fleas and lice, which thrived in the warm woolen clothing of preindustrial times. The rise of the cotton industry provided inexpensive clothing and bedding that could be washed and boiled, a process that killed the typhus louse.

Several other factors—such as growth in real incomes, a subsequent increase in demand for goods, and technological advances—also stimulated the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, played a significant role in the development of the Romantic movement, of which Mary Shelley and her circle were a part. The Romantics, who focused on the individual, the emotional, and the imaginative in life, considered many of the effects of industrialism as a threat to their system of beliefs. Members of the Romantic movement generally viewed many aspects of the fast-developing industrial society with alarm. They harshly criticized less desirable social developments such as the exploitation of labor, which was commonplace in the new industries in England.

The emerging textile factories, iron mills, and coal mines exacted a heavy toll on their workers. In some cities, almost 20 percent of the labor force was made up of children nine years old or younger. Furthermore, the demands for a stable labor force created a system of bonding that forced workers to remain with a company for a set period of time; in some cases cotton mills forced workers to sign five-year bonds. To the Romantics, who believed in individual liberty for the human spirit, this exploitation of the labor force was intolerable. Even the smoking chimneys of industrial plants stood in opposition to Romantic ideals. The Romantics valued natural beauty, an appreciation that is present throughout Frankenstein in Shelley's scenes amid the mountains and lakes of Switzerland and on the frozen seas of Siberia.

Science and Technology in the Romantic Period

The late 1700s were rife with new scientific theories and technological advances. Less than one hundred patents were issued in 1750, but by 1780 the number had jumped to more than four hundred. One of the greatest inventions of this period was the steam engine. There was also a growth in scientific discoveries during this period. One scientist who embodied both the technological and scientific advancements of the time was Erasmus Darwin. Considered the finest doctor of his time in England, Darwin produced numerous inventions, including a speaking machine and a horizontal windmill. His major scientific achievements included his recognition and description of biological evolution, his analysis of plant nutrition and photosynthesis, and his explanation of cloud formation processes.

Not limited to scientific subjects, Darwin was also influential in literary circles. He became immediately famous for a poem entitled “The Botanic Garden.” Darwin's writings had a profound effect on the Romantics, influencing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was one of Darwin's keenest disciples, and he took from the scientist his ideas of infusing science into nature poetry. He also admired Darwin for his radical political beliefs and skepticism about religion. Percy Shelley's admiration for Darwin has led many scholars to credit him as an influence on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The specific idea for the story arose from a discussion between Byron and Shelley about Darwin's notions on the generation of life. This connection is confirmed by the first sentence of Mary Shelley's introduction to Frankenstein, “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence” (Shelley, p. xiii).

Echoes of the French Revolution in Frankenstein

The French Revolution of 1789 greatly influenced the early Romantic writers. Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a fervent supporter of the Revolution even after its excesses of murder and oppression began to disenchant many of its first backers. Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to Mary, but the Revolution continued to exert a strong influence on writers into her daughter's adult years. It instilled in young Romantic poets such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley the idea that they lived in an age of new beginnings, and that everything was possible if inherited customs and procedures were discarded.

Since Shelley's mother, whom she had never known but strongly idealized, and her intimate companions were so strongly influenced by the French Revolution, it seems probable that Mary Shelley incorporated aspects and thoughts on the Revolution into her first novel. The most evident parallel between the French Revolution and the novel appears in the guise of the monster itself. The monster is an incredible, unprecedented achievement; but because it is not given careful attention and direction by its creator, Doctor Frankenstein, it becomes a monstrous murderer who torments the doctor.

This idea ties in smoothly with the prevalent thinking of English radicals during the period. Most of these revolutionary thinkers, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley among them, believed that the French Revolution offered great hope but felt that the excessive and bloody reprisals it inspired were major faults. For this reason, the conception of the French Revolution as a “monster” became a common idea at the time. Another aspect of Frankenstein that links the novel with the revolution is one of its crucial settings. Ingolstadt, Germany, the city in which Victor Frankenstein is educated, was also the birthplace of the Illuminati, a secret society that introduced revolutionary ideas believed by many to have helped foment the revolution in France.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The Luddite Movement

The industrial growth experienced in England in the early nineteenth century was not without opposition. The Luddite movement came into being between 1811 and 1816, a period of unemployment, low wages, and high prices. The movement began in northern England, sparked by increases in the price of grain and potatoes without an equivalent rise in wages. In March 1811, in Nottinghamshire, the Luddites took action against an underpaying textile manufacturer by smashing weaving frames and other factory machines. Machinery was the object of Luddite violence because it was employed in areas of manufacturing that workmen wanted to ban or because it was owned by employers who did not pay fair wages or provide decent working conditions.

The machines of the industrial age, while increasing output, drastically reduced the number of workers needed, with some machines reportedly doing the work of twenty men. This lessened the need for workers and gave employers their choice of job-seekers. Operating from this position of strength, employers often paid lower wages and demanded more labor from their employees. The new machines were also frightening for reasons other than their unparalleled production rate; they threatened the way of life of thousands of craftsmen, such as hand-loom weavers, who were forced to shift from a comparatively independent mode of living into an anonymous position in a crowded factory.

As conditions worsened for these craftsmen and workers, the targets of their frustrations expanded beyond machines. In April 1812, William Horsfall was assassinated by Luddites, allegedly because of the great improvements he made in shearing frames. Peter Marsland, a factory owner who had made improvements on steam-weaving machines, had his life threatened and his factory burned to the ground by Luddites. As time passed, the Luddites increasingly turned to attacks against people in recognition of the impossibility of destroying the large establishments of the industrial movement. As incidents of violence spread and fears of a large-scale uprising grew, the government increasingly used the military against Luddite unrest. The Luddite movement declined after 1813, when seventeen Luddite rioters were convicted and hanged for the murder of William Horsfall, the attack on the Rawfolds woolen mill, and the theft of arms and money for the Luddite cause.

There are some possible connections from the Luddite movement to Mary Shelley and her novel, for the members of the Romantic movement shared some of the same concerns expressed by the Luddites. Lord Byron even spoke to the House of Lords in defense of the Luddites, telling of men “sacrificed to improvements in mechanism” (Byron in Thomis, p. 50). In Shelley's case, her beliefs concerning the dangers of man's technological advancements were presented through her depiction of the murderous rage of Frankenstein's monster. During the years preceding the writing of Frankenstein, the Luddite movement was growing. The novel's warning about the dangers of man's experimentation with technology may well have been inspired by the Luddites' fear of new industrial technology and its effects on their lives.

The Resurrection Men

The advancement of the sciences in England, particularly in the areas of anatomy, medicine, and biology, began a horrifying period in British social history: the age of the resurrection men. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, London surgeons and students bought and mutilated thousands of dead bodies that had been stolen by the lowliest members of society. During this period, the midnight quiet of graveyards could suddenly erupt in gunfire and confrontation between the “resurrection men” (as these grave robbers were called) and authorities.

The strange career of the resurrection men came about as a result of the severe lack of cadavers available for study and dissection. In France bodies for dissection were provided from those that went unclaimed in public hospitals. In Germany, the bodies of prostitutes and suicides were taken. In Britain, the only legal supply of cadavers came from the bodies of murderers executed within the country. After being cut down from the gallows, corpses were hauled to the College of Surgeons, where they would be dissected and given to lecturers at teaching hospitals. Because this practice provided very few bodies, resurrection men were enlisted to acquire corpses for teaching hospitals, whose students would take their tuition elsewhere unless there were enough bodies to examine. Although more stringent laws were passed as incidents of body-snatching increased, punishments were generally not enforced. This lack of enforcement was attributed to English authorities' desire to have surgeons and physicians that were as well trained as those on the European mainland.

Despite the outrage of families of the stolen dead, the resurrection men continued their morbid trade, acquiring a reputation that was known to Mary Shelley and most people in England during the period. Her acquaintance with the resurrection men and their nocturnal diggings may have been heightened by Percy Shelley's interests in anatomy and biology. In addition, she may have read about the resurrection men in the poetry of a fellow Romantic, Robert Southey, who wrote “The Surgeon's Warning,” a poem that describes a dying doctor's plans to safeguard his body against the resurrection men with whom he was so well acquainted. Mary Shelley's familiarity with this practice may have been an influence on her conception of a monster made from a collection of corpses.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

· Abbey, Cherie D., ed. Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987.

· Cole, Hubert. Things for the Surgeon: A History of the Resurrection Men. London: William Heinemann, 1964.

· Coleman, D. C. Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution. London: Hambledon, 1992.

· Haining, Peter. The Man Who Was Frankenstein. London: Frederick Muller, 1979.

· King-Hele, Desmond. Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.

· Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 1983.

· Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.

· Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.

· Thomis, Malcolm I. The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England. Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles, 1970.

Source Citation

"Overview: Frankenstein." Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Vol. 1: Ancient Times to the American and French Revolutions (Prehistory-1790s). Detroit: Gale, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.